📜 LICENSE CLASS: 🔓 PERMISSIVE
Executive Summary: What is it?
The ISC License is a permissive, OSI-approved free software license written by the Internet Systems Consortium and used by default in OpenBSD. It is functionally equivalent to the MIT and BSD 2-Clause licenses, simply with redundant wording removed. It allows you to use, modify, and distribute the software for any purpose, including inside closed-source and commercial products.
CFO / Business Impact: What does it cost/risk?
- Commercial Usage: Unrestricted. You may use ISC-licensed code in proprietary software, SaaS platforms, and internal tools with no royalties and no per-seat fees. There is no network clause (unlike AGPL), so offering the software as a hosted service triggers no source-disclosure requirement.
- Contamination Risk: Zero. Like MIT and BSD, ISC carries no copyleft, so it imposes no obligation to open-source your own code.
Technical Reality: How does it work?
- Modification Rights: "Do what you want, just keep my notice." You must retain the copyright notice and the permission notice in copies or substantial portions of the software. No obligation to publish modifications.
- Patent Protection: None explicit. Like MIT and BSD, ISC grants no express patent license (unlike Apache 2.0). The code is provided "as is" with no warranty and no liability.